A House of Artifacts
by Keynn
Summary: It is a habit grown from a century of wanting things, but Nanao's house holds one thing that she is hesitant to let anyone know exists. - ShunNao
1. Part I

**I Don't Own Bleach.**

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**A House of Artifacts**

ShunNao

Much to the chagrin of her taichou Nanao has rarely ever permitted another soul into her house. This excludes, of course, Matsumoto Rangiku; Nanao considers the beautiful woman among her top friends, and logical, knowledgable Ise Nanao is aware that even she may become the object of poor circumstances. It is best to have someone near to you who you trust to keep secrets when such circumstances present themselves. Nanao believes this whole-heartedly.

_"You know," Rangiku said once "I think your taichou would gladly be that person if you let him." _

But Nanao is terrified of the prospect, and so hasn't.

Nanao's house isn't particularly spectacular. It's rather small, secluded just beyond the tree line, within walking distance of the 8th division barracks. It was built for the fukutaichou of the division and aside from minor revisions it retains most of the previous installments Yadamora Lisa had put in — It's been over a century and Nanao still, every once in a blue moon, stumbles upon a dirty magazine or manga left by her mentor — Noticeably, the greatest difference between the old and new is an extended windowsill, large enough to throw a blanket and pillow on and drift to bed at. This feature is in Nanao's living room, overlooking a distant patch of beautiful blooming cherry blossom trees that remind Nanao of her taichou on days she is comfortable enough to indulge the thoughts. It is a feature which was also put into the joint office she and Kyoraku-taichou share, although on days when she is at work it is he who sleeps in the area and she finds that she envies his ease of access to something she so loves.

There are, of course, loads of bookshelves in her house as well. They line most of the walls; decoratively designed to fit at shaved angles, created from cedar trees which smell so very lovely that the only scent Nanao values higher is that of the cherry blossoms which float in in spring when she leaves her windows open. Kyoraku-taichou has come to love the smell of cedar as it is what he equates most with his Nanao-chan.

Most of the bookshelves are lined with fictional literature, manuals and informational tomes, but Nanao's greatest pride - resulting from a habit acquired as a rukongai street rat - are her nicknacks. On the rough streets nicknacks were a child's dearest treasures, providing a sense of closeness and comfort, not unlike a stuffed animal or a security blanket. Nanao owns a plush cat which remains on the highest shelf in her room where no one who isn't looking for it can find it; Nanao named it Macchia when she was very young, only a year or so before her recruitment into the eighth. As the years trudged on and Nanao developed a more vested interest in knowledge her nicknacks slowly made the assent into artifacts, collected from a variety of places and people. She is proud of most of them, ashamed of some and deeply embarrassed by one. If not for it, perhaps she would allow her taichou more leeway where her living quarters were concerned.

This one artifact she does so well to hide is a small red flame. Nanao remembers the day she received it. She was running weekend errands in a poor district of west rukongai. Her shinigami robes had been left behind as to not attract attention. She'd just finished her list and was grabbing a quick bite to eat before she head for home. Across from the stand which sold the papaya she was buying was an old woman, ancient in appearance and probably twice what she seemed in years. She beaconed Nanao to her, and reluctantly Nanao approached.

"A shinigami are you?" The elder woman chuckled, waving her hand for Nanao to sit. She did so reluctantly.

"How could you know that?" Nanao questioned, eyes narrowed in warning.

"How could I not?" The woman smiled. "I'm a fortune teller. I simply read the signs and they all point to you, the shinigami."

Nanao was not stupid enough to believe fortune telling didn't exist in the after life. Souls were mysterious creatures; even those who had lived for millennia had not completely understood them. All the same …

"I don't put much stock in star readers." Nanao stated, moving to stand.

"Nor should you." The woman said. "But here, for you." And she handed Nanao the small cage in which the flame resided. "This is the Infinity Flame, as long as its possessor is in love, the flame will never go out. It lit up when I caught sight of you. Every girl in love deserves a congratulatory gift. So few people are truly in love." Nanao inspected the flame for a moment, and deciding this was foolish made to hand it back. The woman was gone, stand and all.

Nanao looked at the flame now, she'd had it for nearly forty years and the flame was still strong. When she was angry at her captain, or hurt to the brink of tears she'd often tried to blow it out, but in times like those the flame simply grew stronger, as if to taunt her foolishness. Those who fall in love with their superiors, their laid back, flirtatious superiors, could expect nothing more than heartache. For all Nanao tried to distance herself from the man, the flame never once even wavered, as if to doubt whether it need actually be burning.

Nanao frowned deeply as she watched it flicker and grow with her musings. She blew it out again. For a moment the whole room went dark as night, but only for that moment. When it ended the flame was back, illuminating the whole of her small living room in a dim red tint.

"I'm such a fool."

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_Something quick, unedited, posted on tumblr. I've got half of a second part written out, one with more Kyoraku but I'm not sure if I should post it or not. Let me know and reviews are always appreciated. :3_


	2. Part II

**I Don't Own Bleach.**

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**A House of Artifacts**

_ShunNao_

In the week following Nanao-chan's deployment to the real world on 'personal business' Shunsui had been excessively bored.

As not to say there wasn't paperwork that need be done, or task to occupy the lull in beautiful scenery, but Shunsui found that being bored was better than being suffocated by a mound of paperwork. Nanao-chan, of course, would be displeased to come back to the office in a couple of days. Shunsui knew this, much like he knew the sun rose and set and sake would run out if he did not replenish the compromised hiding locations (as of now there were so many reams of paper stacked upon each other in the office that simply opening the door was a bit problematic).

Shunsui sunk lower into the tree trunk he was resting on.

Being that it was autumn, the leaves above him were red and every so often one would fall. Shunsui happened to know that the months between late autumn and early winter were Nanao's preferred time of the year. He's asked her about it once and had been given no response, thought Rangiku, who'd been with them at the time, alluded to the idea that perhaps it was because she liked the crispness of the world at that time. Nanao's face, if he remembered correctly, had gone very, very red, when Rangiku preceded to explain why it was Nanao also especially enjoyed spring, and Nanao had, in an attempt to change the subject, explained why she didn't like summer and early autumn. All in all, the conversation had been both adorable and informative.

Deciding that a leisurely walk would alleviate the boredom, Shunsui stood from his spot. He was in the wooded area behind his division, a place he didn't commonly go to, not that it wasn't beautiful, especially in autumn and spring, but because more often than not he was either at Juu's division, somewhere on the compound of his own, or frequenting the bars. He didn't want to make it too hard for Nanao to find him if she needed him, though given enough time he doubted there was anywhere she couldn't hunt him down from.

He made a slow pace wandering between trees and fallen logs for awhile, admiring the going-ons. The forest smelt strongly of cedar wood, something which always lingered on his Nanao-chan's skin when he was close enough to get a small whiff of it. These periods were few and far between, but the uncommon fragrance had become an association with his lovely fukutaichou because it was something that seemed to be a soul attribute of her. Grinning with the thought of an idea, Shunsui sped up his pace a bit, as people tend to do when they have thought of a place they need to be.

It was, of course, common knowledge that the eighth division's fukutaichou quarters were in this forest, as the grounds in which the forest lay was technically still owned by the eighth division. Shunsui had only been to her house a handful of times since Nanao had inherited it, and on none of those occasions had he been allowed in. He remembered the general layout from the time in which Lisa had inhabited it, it was a cozy thing, windows made up most of the walls on the ground floor, which made for a very bright, open atmosphere. His Nanao-chan had a habit of shutting the curtains when she was not home, and putting a privacy barrier around it when she was. He was under strong suspicion this his beautiful fukutaichou was hiding something, but never had any great opportunity to investigate. Now though, she was out of town, and curiosity led his feet to the secluded house, built in the small place where just enough trees were just far enough away from one another to fit the thing. As expected, the curtains were drawn closed. As Shunsui approached it he couldn't help but to think it was a bit unfair. After all, Nanao-chan had been to his house several hundreds of times, either with work, or to bring him home, on rare occasions she would come there for comfort and Shunsui would give it willingly. These were times that Nanao refused to talk about, and Shunsui, though not happily, agreed to let them fade into a back memory. They were vulnerable times, coming up on anniversaries of lost loved ones or before impending wars, and because his Nanao-chan had always a particularly stubborn individual (and stubborn was really the best word for it) she refused to acknowledge that she bled just like everyone else. His beautiful, guarded Nanao-chan.

He swooped under a tree branch with ease out-of-place with his large frame and whistled pleasantly as he tried to peak through the tightly shut curtains.

"My Nanao-chan is so clever~" He hummed as a small shock of electricity reached his palm when he made to touch the window. Kido no doubt. He chuckled good naturally, it was a familiar tingle and sometimes accompanied the bonks on his head when she hit him with her book. He sighed, and was about to go back to the office roof to dream further about his fukutaichou when a little gap in the dark curtains caught his eye. A light shown through it, and had it not been approaching evening Shunsui doubted if he'd see it.

"Nanao-chan forgot to blow out all the candles before she left?" He wondered allowed, peering through the small crack. Sure enough, a small flame in the far corner of her house could be seen. He thought, briefly, about getting Rangiku, who he knew had found several ways to sneak into Nanao-chan's house uninjured, but decided against it. He could slip through the kido just as easily, blow out the candle so it didn't catch anything on fire, and be innocently oblivious when his fukutaichou arrived home the following evening.

And he did just that, circling to the front door and slipping past the (remarkably high-leveled and surprisingly painful kido) mostly uninjured. When he opened the door his senses were immediately assaulted by everything Nanao. The smell, the style, the whole of the house. It was as cozy inside as it had been outside. Furnished in colors of black, white and red; small accents of pink. Bookshelves everywhere, small objects which Shunsui thought fit, despite how oddly out of place they all were. The shelves held pictures here and there, but the walls were plain and everything was organized as his Nanao-chan always seemed to be. The window seat had not gone unnoticed and Shunsui knew for certain it hadn't been there when Lisa lived in the same house, he walked to it, saw the small blanket and pillow, a book dogeared on a page, rested on the seat as well. He could imagine, vividly, his beautiful Nanao sitting there in the evening, her work clothes disregarded, reading silently, and thought that it seemed a very lonely picture so what if he added himself to it? The resulting fantasy was much more his taste and he stood for several moments imagining, instead, her hair loose, sitting between his legs, her head resting on his chest, reading as he pointed out the beautiful, but less captivating trees in the picture window beside them.

Shunsui smiled sincerely as he went to go toward the source of the reason he was here at all, after all, his Nanao-chan would be unhappy if she knew he'd been snooping, and though he hadn't intended to, being surrounded by so many things that were just like her made his mind foggy with un-acquired wants.

The source, as it turned out, of the light which prompted his intuition to begin with was a small flame. It hovered singularly in a brass cage situated on the middle bookshelf under the stairs. It was enticing, much like his Nanao-chan and an interesting little artifact, it seemed almost a shame to blow it out, but catching her house on fire seemed a bigger shame, so smiling sadly, he sucked in a bit of air and then released it into the cage. For a moment or so the room got very dark, and then to Shunsui's surprise, the flame lit back up. His eyebrows crinkled briefly in confusion before something very familiar resonated within him.

Shunsui was not a young man, he was ruggedly attractive and had the eyes of wisdom very few other people possessed; and both were the result of years upon years upon years of life.

In one of those years Shunsui had encountered this particular flame before. Or, more precisely, had once been exposed to its source. Of that he knew. The flame had been created while he was in the academy by a women with very little spiritual pressure in one of the lower districts, it had been a complete anomaly and when an instructor had gone to collect it, the flame had vanished. This was strange because reports indicated that the flame had been burning for years. Regardless, the cage which held the flame had been put on exhibit for students in the kido department as encouragement for students to try harder. Shunsui remembered this flame because there was a freshman boy coming in in his final year who had ignited the flame.

Yes, Shunsui knew exactly what this was.

"Nanao-chan has been keeping such wonderful secrets from me."

It was then, staring at the tiny flame, that Shunsui missed the door sliding open.

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_Well, this is a long and boring chapter. ^^; Next chapter will have interactions (finally) I'm not sure if I want to end it next chapter or continue on, I could potentially make this story a good 10 chapters long, but I'm curious if people would even follow it for that long? Let me know, hope you enjoyed, I'll try to get the next chapter up before next Saturday. :3_


	3. Part III

**I don't own Bleach.**

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**A House of Artifacts - Part III**

_ShuNao_

Nanao came into her home knowing something was amiss. The kido spells she'd set up around the small building had crackled with something akin to strain that she knew meant someone had recently gone through the trouble of avoiding its more potent side effects. Given enough time, a few hours or so, the kido would restore itself to normalcy and effectiveness, so Nanao knew for certain that the intruder was either still present or very recently gone. She called on the reserve of bubbling power within her core and was all warrior prowess sliding the door open with a precision used in a variety of other ways within her life. Her home was a personal place for her alone and those she chose to associate herself with. Nanao was not often a women of fury, but the cackling purple between her fingers betrayed the anger she felt at such an intrusion into her life.

The crackling, the anger and the instincts honed in a life of military training and execution died with the rising of something Nanao would later come to determine as mortification when she entered her quaint living room and saw – in shock or perhaps betrayal – her captain standing among the meaningless aspect collected as memories of her life, looking thoughtfully at the little red flame. Her reiatsu flared in a way which wasn't unfriendly, but maybe a little hostile than was permitted with a superior to get his attention and he seemed to stiffen, the only indication she'd caught him off-guard, and turned around.

"Such a pretty flame Nanao-chan." He said charmingly, an underlined seriousness that only decades of being in his presence indefinitely had allowed her to identify, coated his words as he spoke.

"Sir." She stated. Shunsui had heard the word on more occasions than he cared to count. The first time she'd ever addressed him as 'sir' was on her first day as a member of the eight division, back when her name had been lost amongst dozens of other names and the only thing he could put stock in was her appearance; large glasses behind eyes almost equally as large. She'd just been transferred, he'd asked her a question meant to address her age – a young age, one of the youngest in the Gotei 13, very nearly matching the prodigy that was Ichimaru Gin – and her response had been a simple 'sir.' In the single word she'd addressed her distaste in his acknowledgment of her status as a child, the word also sounds like a request for more respect (she was, after all, a soldier at this point, and all soldiers deserved the respect they gave when they agreed to lay their lives down for a superior, or an equal, or a lesser.) And in doing all of this, that one little word also managed to bestow upon him her own respect, earned by title rather than any personal knowledge of the man she would come to know as her taichou. 'Sir,' when used by Nanao, could mean a million different things, and Shunsui was hard pressed to find a time he couldn't identify what that meaning was.

This time it was shock, an underlined pain; humiliation. Nanao liked to believe her emotions were very hard to read, and when she remained silent, it was not untrue. Shunsui's worst moments were when Nanao choose to bite her lip – something only done in times of so much rage or sadness saying anything at all made her eyes hollow with something Shunsui still hadn't identified – in those times, his Nanao-chan was unreadable. Blank as an unused journal; they were terrifying times for Shunsui. When Nanao talked, her emotions were betrayed in the ways in which she articulated her words, how she strung them about, even if her posture and mannerisms made it seem (to the untrained eye) as though she had no emotion at all. It had taken Shunsui nearly twenty years to hone the skills necessary to decode her crypt dialect, but he'd done it, and done it in a way that let Nanao believe she'd been on top, or in control, if for no other reason than to preserve her sanity. Life was a long thing, and Shunsui believed Nanao had the right to suspect her emotions were her own to control, whether or not that was the case.

"Please leave." Nanao said, her words icy and clearly range through the small room, but not with distaste or annoyance, rather something a little closer to her heart than she'd like to admit, but Shunsui was not so easily persuaded to leave a conversation he wanted to partake in, as Juushiro and any number of bartenders could attests to, so he stayed put, his eyes moving of their own accord back to the tiny flame; Nanao's cheeks were on the verge of glowing a red which had never graced her pretty face in the time it had taken Shunsui to get to know, and ultimately be enticed by her. "I am not so ill educated to miss your familiarity with this artifact taichou and I'm asking-" something in her voice made Shunsui sublimely replace the last word with _begging _as it was more appropriate, and closer to her actual sentiments. "-that we not discuss this, and that you leave my quarters, as I did not permit your entrance and do not condone it either." Her words had gone oddly steel-like in quality, which was a new experience for Shunsui, and knowing when to no longer push Lady Luck he sighed good-naturally, hoping to relax the decidedly unfriendly air, and took a couple long strides away from the flame, noticing as he did so the light relaxation of Nanao's stiff shoulders. He stopped just before he passed by her, looking down with very warm, and infinitely deep brown eyes. He said:

"As you wish lovely Nanao-chan, but this is not an indefinite truce. Won't you discuss this with me?"

She said nothing, the deafening silence Shunsui had come to hate so much, and resigned to the current stand off he nodded, took one glance around the room – remembering ever detail he cared to take in at once (and it was a rather large care, so he took in quite a bit) – and smiled sadly down at his second-in-command.

He could faintly here a broken sob-like sound as he slid the door closed behind him. Feeling his previous light-heartedness sour with the swirling reiatsu of his lovely, but currently emotionally-unstable fukutaichou and knowing at this time there was nothing he could do to regain her confidence (at this point he knew that his presence would only bring her more shame, an emotion which she had no reason to feel as the flame was not shameful, but beautiful, but he knew his Nanao-chan well enough to know that's exactly what she would feel, and she would hate him for not leaving her to her thoughts) Shunsui decided tonight was a very nice night to meet his oldest friend – and if there was a god out there willing to pity him – get very, _very _drunk.

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_It didn't occur to me until about ten minutes ago that I've got three incomplete ShuNao stories, and one that I haven't even touched in awhile, so I think my next update will be for **Relations. **Sorry if this seems rushed. I've been in an airport for the better part of an afternoon, and this is what was keeping me busy for parts of it – I was writing short segments at different times._

_Anyway, I hope you all enjoy, and I would not object to any reviews you might want to throw my way. :3_


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